


Was That Supposed to Hurt?

by actualbabe



Series: We All Die Trying to Get it Right (the college au) [1]
Category: New Girl
Genre: College AU, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Political AU, this got way out of hand but i love it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 11:40:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13247490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actualbabe/pseuds/actualbabe
Summary: “Well, well, well. Look who we have here,” a voice says from over her shoulder, and Jess recognizes the gruff, uncaring tone without even looking behind her.“Miller,” she spits out, and turns to face him. “What are you doing here?”“You’re not the only one who goes to this school, Day,” he says sarcastically.Jess huffs and rolls her eyes. “I’m just surprised you’re not locked up in your dorm room getting high and wasting your tuition dollars.”





	Was That Supposed to Hurt?

“Hi! Are you registered to vote in Los Angeles?” Jess asks a passing student. They smile uncomfortably at her and walk a little faster towards the safety of the dining hall.

A small herd of students walks by, pointedly avoiding making eye contact with Jess as she calls out to them. “Are you registered to vote in Los Angeles?”

Jess spots one of the students from the  _Intro to Political Activism_  course she’s the TA for, and she waves at them from across the student pavilion and yells. “Are you registered to vote in Los Angeles?”

“Well, well, well. Look who we have here,” a voice says from over her shoulder, and Jess recognizes the gruff, uncaring tone without even looking behind her.

“Miller,” she spits out, and turns to face him. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re not the only one who goes to this school, Day,” he says sarcastically.

Jess huffs and rolls her eyes. “I’m just surprised you’re not locked up in your dorm room getting high and wasting your tuition dollars.”

Nick narrows his eyes and opens his mouth to make some smart-ass comment when he’s suddenly interrupted.

“Um, excuse me?” The student fidgets nervously with the lanyard hanging around his neck. “Can I register to vote with you?”

Jess lights up, and scrambles for a new packet on her clipboard. “Yes! Are you a freshman?”

He warily looks at the stack of papers Jess is assembling. “Yeah, uh-”

“Don’t do it, kid,” Nick cuts in. “The whole system is rigged. Political parties, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, all of it.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Jess says quickly and pulls a pen out of her pocket. “He has no clue what he’s talking about.”

“Oh, I know exactly what I’m talking about,” Nick says with his typical cocky self-assurance. “Just come to one of the College Lib meetings. Blair Hall. East Wing corridor. Wednesdays at 9 pm. Prepare to have your mind blown.”

Jess scoffs and rolls her eyes.

The poor little freshman looks back and forth between the two of them with a look of panic. “I uh- I think I’m gonna work on this at home. Um, thank you for the help.” He stuffs the papers into his backpack and scurries off.

Jess watches him go with a sigh of defeat and then smacks Nick in the arm with her clipboard. “What the hell, Miller?”

“Was that supposed to hurt?” he asks sarcastically, even though he’s at rubbing the sore spot on his arm.

“You asshole!” She intensifies her glare at him. “You’re impeding the ability of our democracy to function!”

He rolls his eyes. “The two party system is what’s halting democracy.”

Jess resists the urge to strangle him. “It encourages participation and makes politics accessible for everyone.”

“Uh huh, sure.” Nick looks at her skeptically. “Exactly what I’d expect from the President of Young Democrats. You’re the one profiting off the system. You know nothing about the common man.”

“Oh, give me a break. You think you’re all  _in-touch_  just because you’re- what? The social chair of College Libertarians?” Jess scoffs. “All you do is buy booze for parties.”

Nick fumes. “Whatever. I have to get to class.” He snags the pen off her clipboard. “I’m keeping this.”

Jess frowns as she watches him storm off towards the quad.  _Fucking Nick Miller. God, she hates him._

_\---_

During the following week Jess nearly collapses under the stress of everything going on in her life. She has two exams to study for, a nine page research paper to write, and a group project to organize. To top it all off, voter registration ends on Friday, so the Young Democrats club decides to triple-up on tabling and clipboarding shifts so they can make sure all the eligible students can get registered before the deadline ends.

Miraculously, she manages to survive the week. Jess concludes the final debrief meeting with Young Democrats on Friday afternoon, and then comes back to her dorm room to enjoy a well-deserved two hour nap. She wakes up just in time to get dinner with her roommate Cece.

“So you survived!” her best friend teases.

“Thank God.” Jess laughs. “I don’t want to see another clipboard for the next month.”

Cece smiles at her. “You love it though.”

“Yeah,” she admits. “I really do.”

“Good for you, babe. You’re really making a difference.”

“Thanks, Ceec.”

“Anytime.”

They pick up their food from the counter and sit down at one of the booths lining the little pizza parlor. Jess digs into her massive slice of cheese pizza while Cece arranges the toppings on her slice until the distribution is just the way she likes it.

“So,” Cece asks once she’s finally satisfied enough to take a bite. “Does this mean you can come out with me this weekend?”

Jess sighs. “I don’t know…”

“C’mon, It’ll be fun! You don’t have anything important to do next week. Besides, you need to relax. You earned this!”

“Alright,” she concedes, and Cece grins.

\---

The frat party is a little too loud and crowded for Jess’ liking, but she doesn’t mind it too much once she’s had two cups of the punch they’re serving upstairs in the bedroom of one of the brothers. She spends the first part of the night with Cece, who eventually leaves her for the dance floor downstairs. Jess talks to some hot guy for a little while, a pre-med student named Sam who seems more than a little interested in hooking up with her. But then he calls her Katie, even though she told him at least three times that her name was  _Jess_. She tries not to roll her eyes and excuses herself to get another drink.

Jess fills up her plastic Solo cup and then heads down the other hallway to find either Cece or someone new to mingle with. As she’s walking into another room someone runs right into her, nearly making her spill her drink all over the front of her dress. “Hey! Watch it!”

“ _Shit-_  sorry,” the guy says and-  _oh no. Not him again._

“What are you doing here?” she asks accusingly.

“My roommate is one of the brothers,” Nick says, pointing towards the hallway to someone in the crowd. “Why are  _you_  here? I’m surprised you don’t have a clipboard to assault people with.”

Jess narrows her eyes at him. “Voter registration ended this afternoon. Not that you would know, apparently.”

He takes a long sip of beer. “Hey, I vote. Just because I’m disenfranchised with the system-”

“Oh right, the  _system._ ” She rolls her eyes and takes a drink. “Look, it sucks sometimes. But so does every other form of government. You can’t just tear down everything and start from scratch.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t try to make reforms-”

“You aren’t trying to reform anything!” she says in exasperation. “You Libertarians just complain about how things are broken without any actual realistic plan to fix it. You’d never get anything done if you were in office.”

Nick scoffs. “At least we would manage to  _get into_  office-”

Jess groans. “Oh not this bullshit again!”

He raises a finger and jabs it at her chest. “Sanders would’ve beaten "I have a great relationship with the blacks" "People are praying for me" Donald "I am the only person who immediately walked out of my 'Ali G' interview" Trump and you know it.”

“How would he have won the general election when he couldn’t even win the primary?” Jess bites back, taking another long drink from her cup. She needs a solid buzz if she has to rehash this fight with Nick for what must be the hundredth time since they met in their  _American Politics_  class Freshman year. “Clinton lost because people still don’t trust the idea of a woman in power-”

Nick frowns at her. “Don’t try to make this into a feminist thing-”

“It is a feminist thing!” she cries out, throwing her hands up in the air, and the remaining drink in her cup comes dangerously close to sloshing out and spilling all over the rug of the poor kid whose room they’re standing in.

“The bottom line is that Clinton couldn’t beat "She talks like a truck driver" "People are praying for me" Donald "I am the only person who immediately walked out of my 'Ali G' interview" Trump,” Nick says, counting off his points on his fingers. “She had too much baggage. She was too establishment. She couldn’t connect to the blue collar workers in the rust belt.”

Jess feels like she’s about to scream. “But she did beat him! She won the popular vote!”

“Then why didn’t she win the election?” Nick asks and calmly lift his beer up to his lips.

She stares at him in disbelief. She knows her answer. The Electoral College system is biased and outdated and need to be changed, and it cost Clinton the election. It’s the system’s fault. They need to ditch the system in place and come up with something better to replace it.

_Fucking Nick Miller._

Of course he managed to steer the argument so that she would come around and prove his original point. She hates that he can do this to her, how he can twist her arguments into whatever he wants them to be. She’s so used to blowing her opponents out of the water in debates. She hates that Nick is the only guy on campus who’s good enough to occasionally outsmart her in the game she’s best at.

She hates that she can’t seem to tear herself away from him, and that no matter how angry she gets, she just keeps on coming back for more. She hates the lopsided grin he wears when he knows that he’s right. She hates his dumb second-hand flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled up to bare his forearms. She hates his warm brown eyes and dark hair and the shadow of stubble on his jaw. She hates that he’s totally her type and that sometimes she’ll catch herself staring at him during class when she’s supposed to be paying attention to the professor.

Nick drives her insane. He fills her up with this white-hot energy and she doesn’t know if she wants to punch him in the nose or pin him up against the wall and tap him like a maple tree. She wants to nail his mouth with her mouth. Want to nail him good and hard and strong.

Before she can rethink it, Jess grabs Nick by the collar of his stupid flannel and kisses him.

He freezes up in surprise. A few seconds pass and Jess starts to realize what a horrible idea this is. But then Nick’s kissing her back. She fists her right hand in the material of his shirt and yanks him another inch down towards her. Meanwhile her left hand dangles awkwardly in the air, still holding her half-full cup of punch. Nick’s grip is tight on her hip and he takes a step towards her but instead treads right on top of her toes.

“Ow,” she breaks off the kiss. “My foot.”

“Well, then move your damn feet,” he grumbles as he chases after her lips.

“Then kiss me like a man!” she challenges and tilts her head up.

Nick frowns and sets his empty can down on the ground. Then he reaches around the back of her legs and hoists Jess up into the air. He sets her down on top of the surface of the desk before kissing her again. She grabs onto his shoulders and kisses him furiously. It’s almost like when they fight, intense and full of that chaotic energy that she just can’t get enough of.

She pulls away to take a deep breath. “You’re a mess!’

“You are so annoying with your little dresses,” he yells back. Nick slides his hand dangerously high up the outside curve of her thigh, and Jess can feel the heat radiating from it though the thin fabric of her tights.

Jess groans and kisses him briefly. “Why are you so angry all the time?”

Nick closes his eyes and leans back in towards her. “Jess, I’m begging you to shut up.”

They go back to making out, and it’s hot in every way that Jess had refused to let herself imagine before this moment. Nick makes her feel twirly and sexy like she never really has in the past and she desperately wants _more._  She yanks him even closer and she can feel him getting hard in his jeans and she moans into his mouth.

“Hey Bernie and Hillary!” someone yells in their direction. “Get a room!”

Jess is breathless when she pulls away from Nick. He’s looking at her intensely, his eyes dark in the low lighting. “Do you wanna get out of here?” she asks him, her voice so wrung out that she can barely recognize it.

Nick nods frantically and grabs her hand, interlocking their fingers together as he practically drags her out of the house.

\---

They leave the party and go back to Nick’s place, because he has a single room and Jess doesn’t want to deal with the awkwardness of texting Cece to ask if she could have a ‘friend’ over for a few hours. He lives just a few blocks from campus in a run-down house with three other guys. There’s a little plastic sign hanging down from the roof of the porch that says  _The Loft_  in a scraggly handwriting with a cartoon whale drawn next to it.

“Cute,” she teases.

“Yeah, uh- I don’t know when that got there. It just appeared one day and it’s too much work to take it down.” Nick flushes and focuses on unlocking the front door. Jess has a feeling that there’s more to that story, but she doesn’t push it. She’ll bother him more about it later. He finally manages to get the door open and waves her inside. “Did you want, I don’t know, water or something?”

“I’m good.”

“Cool. Cool.” He clears his throat nervously. “So uh- My room’s upstairs. On the left.”

Jess nods. “Cool.”

She awkwardly leads the way up the stairs, cringing at the loud creaking that echoes down the hall with every step she takes. They get to his bedroom, which is just as messy as she expected it to be. There’s a mix of clean and dirty laundry randomly piled up on the floor, all his school work is haphazardly spilled across the desk with his backpack propped on his desk chair, and an odd assortment of posters are stuck up on the wall with looks like duct tape.

“Do you play guitar?” she asks, staring at the guitar that’s propped up beside his unmade bed. Nick makes a noncommittal noise behind her back.

There’s the sound of the door clicking shut and then Nick grabs her elbow and tugs her so that she’s facing him. Jess barely has time to gasp before his lips are on hers. She lets her eyes fall shut and wraps her arms around his neck. Nick kisses her deeper than he had at the party, his open mouth against hers and it’s  _amazing_. He pulls her flush against him with one hand against her back and the other tangled up in her hair.

Jess pushes herself as close as she can and kisses him back, their lips slick as they slide against each other. She tilts her head to get a good angle while he runs his hands up and down her back. Her head starts to feel dizzy from the way he’s kissing the living daylights out of her, but she doesn’t want him to stop. Ever. She slides one of her hands down the line of his shoulders and grabs the collar of his flannel as his grip tightens on her waist.

Nick slows down the kiss and then pulls away from her lips with wet pop. He rests his forehead against hers, and all she can hear is her heart thundering in her ears and the sound of Nick’s heavy breathing. “Is this okay?” he asks, his voice deep and raspy in a way that sets all of Jess’ nerves on fire.

 _“Yes,”_  she gasps and then whimpers when he kisses her again, firm and tender.

She feels weak in the knees and nudges him in the direction of his bed because she’s not sure if she’ll be able to manage to stay upright if he keeps kissing her like that. His hand traces up the line of her spine to the nape of her neck and slowly drags down the zipper of her dress.

“You should be on top,” he murmurs against her lips when their knees bump into the bed frame. “Because of feminism.”

“That’s not what feminism is,” she laughs breathlessly. “You’re just lazy.”

Nick drops down to sit on the edge of the mattress and she steps up into the space between his legs. He cranes his head to look at her face and reaches one hand up to play with the ends of her hair. “No, I’m pretty sure that’s what it is. I took  _Intro Gender Studies_  last semester.”

Jess rolls her eyes. “Yeah, well I’m a Gender Studies minor,” she brags and pulls her dress over her head, leaving her in just her underwear and tights.

Nick swallows and his eyes go wide as he looks her up and down. “You’re right. Whatever you said. You’re right. About everything.” He tentatively rests a hand on the outside curve of her waist, his thumb brushing over the line of her ribcage. “ _Fuck,_  you’re amazing.”

“Damn,” she giggles as Nick’s hands travel over her newly exposed skin. “If I had known getting naked was all it would take for you to agree with me then I would’ve done this ages ago.”

“You should’ve,” he agrees, leaning in to suck at the skin of her collarbone. “I’ve had a crush on you since like, the day we met.”

“Really?” she gasps, threading her hands through the soft locks of his hair.

He nips at her pulse point and her toes curl in response as she arches into him.  _“Fuck, yes,”_  Nick groans and Jess shivers.

“Kiss me,” she whispers hoarsely, pulling at his shirt and tumbling into bed with him.

**Author's Note:**

> and then they start dating and get married and then in thirty years Jess is the President and Nick is a freelance political author and writes about either how amazing his wife is or about all the flaws in her policies the end.
> 
> I have tentative plans to continue this in the future ;)
> 
> check me out on [tumblr](http://actualbabe.tumblr.com/)


End file.
